Home-made Cayenne Pepper
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Remove the stalks from the chili peppers and place the pods in a colander.
Set the colander before the fire for about 12 hours until the peppers are dry.
Grind and sift
Transfer the dried peppers to a mortar and add coarse sea salt.
Pound and rub the mixture until it is as fine as possible.
Sift the mixture through muslin, then pound the residue and sift again.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Chili peppers
- Provide the main body, heat and flavour of the powder once dried and ground.
- Coarse sea salt
- Draws out moisture and helps the ground powder keep well.
The step that matters
Drying the peppers thoroughly. Peppers that retain moisture will not grind into a fine powder and are more prone to spoiling. Drying removes water, so the pods become brittle enough to pound and sift evenly.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
More cayenne pepper recipes
You might also like
Tomato Soup526 recipes
Brown Bread461 recipes
Mutton Broth292 recipes
Yorkshire Pudding264 recipesThe free Flavor Lab newsletter: one surprising pairing a week and the molecular reason it works, in 60 seconds. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Prefer an account? Create a free account to save pairings and unlock the full chemistry.